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Below is a look at the past morbidity (how many people became sick) of what were once very common infectious diseases, and the current morbidity in the U.S. There’s no smallpox and no polio, almost no measles, dramatically less chickenpox (also known as varicella) and H. influenza (that’s not flu, but a bacteria that can cause deadly meningitis.

This should drive home how effective the common childhood inoculations, made by Merck, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis, are. The pneumococcal vaccine, made by Pfizer, has resulted in dramatic drops in meningitis and pneumonia. When Bristol-Myers Squibb lost a patent case related to its hepatitis B drug the other week, investors shrugged, because children here are vaccinated against hepatitis B, so this isn’t a big market. The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine has been failing us, because immunity against it fades. But there’s still a dramatic reduction in what was once a common disease.

Update: To be clear, these data represent data collected in 2007 on past incidence of these diseases. This was published here, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The current data are annualized cases for 2010, per thelink to the original data that I had included above.

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Your argument, while on the surface seems to have merit, it is actually moot. When someone eats a can of tuna, they are ingesting it orally and it gets filtered through multiple layers of the digestive system before it reaches the blood stream. Vaccines are directly injected.

My grandmother passed away last year. The last time I saw her we talked about our family tree and some of the most moving events of her life. She told me of neighbors dying in the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 and recalled her own father dying of “consumption” (tuberculosis). She also told me how her only son (my father), not even a year old, simultaneously fell ill with measles and mumps and then developed pneumonia and was not expected to live. The Family Doctor came over to the house and used bed sheets to construct a make-shift oxygen tent as a last-ditch resort, which thankfully worked.

Today all these diseases are vaccine-preventable. Imagine living in world depicted in the left-hand column on this graphic!

mbrown – as much as loosing people you love is tough; we are, as a species, trying to eraticate anything that poses a risk to our life. In turn overpopulating the planet and killing it. So as heart breaking as the column on the left is, it is natural population control, humans are playing god and its not going to turn out well in the overall scheme of things. All we are currently doing is destroying more of the planet to make room for more subdivisions, invading on natural habitat for every other life form on the planet to suit our own personal conveniences and desires and trying to find any way possible to live forever and end HUMAN suffering at the expense of every other species out there and the planet as a whole. Its unrealistic and we just need to start living life as it was intended to be.

This is actually wrong. What actually happens when children die often and young is that people have more children. Vaccines actually lower the birth rate because it makes more sense to raise just a few kids and put all your resources into raising them. So cutting the death rate can prevent overpopulation, not cause it. This was actually very, very important to Bill Gates when he decided to start funding vaccines, as I detailed here.

An interesting stat that can be extrapolated from this data is the number of illnesses adjusted for total population. The article suggests that about 5 million people were affected by these illnesses and in 1940 the population was about 132 million which translates to 3.8%. In 2010 the population was about 309 million but instead of the expected 11.7 million illnesses, we had less than 500K.

I think a more fitting title to this article would be “How Vaccines Have Changed The US”, or perhaps “How Vaccines Have Changed the Developed World”. I haven’t seen any infographics on the change in disease morbidity from vaccine use for the entire planet, but I dont think that the US percentages or disease types can be applied with accuracy to the rest of the world. Its amazing to see what vaccines have been able to accomplish where they have been implemented successfully. Now lets see if we can replicate these numbers in the world’s poor and marginalized populations

I’ve seen some of the data. A lot of these vaccines are getting to people in the developing world, thanks to the efforts of GAVI and Bill Gates. And smallpox is gone everywhere, polio almost everywhere. But yes, we could do a better job.

Opposition by Muslim fundamentalists is a major factor in the failure of polio immunization programs. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Taliban have issued fatwas opposing vaccination as an attempt to avert Allah’s will, and as an American plot to sterilize Muslims. The Taliban have kidnapped, beaten, and assassinated vaccination officials, including assassinating the head of Pakistan’s vaccination campaign in Bajaur Agency.

Hi Matthew, As a health psychologist & researcher, I’m glad you’re highlighting the benefits of preventive health care, especially vaccines which have come under fire due to a scientifically uninformed minority.

This graphic would be more powerful if the differential morbidity of the diseases were graphically represented, too. Instead, the graph suggests, with same size syringes throughout, that all diseases have the same annual population impact (numbers of cases). Yet the range is from 152 annual cases (congenital rubella) to over 4 million (varicella). A more effective graphic would help the viewer see this differential across diseases without having to read the individual numbers showing inside the syringes!